Re: Oracle purchases Sleepycat - is this the "other shoe"

> On Wednesday 15 February 2006 01:38, Tom Lane wrote:
>> merlyn@stonehenge.com (Randal L. Schwartz) writes:
>>> Oracle purchases Sleepycat.  From what I understand, BerkeleyDB was the
>>> "other" way that MySQL could have transactions if Oracle decided to
>>> restrict InnoDB tables (after purchasing Innobase last year).
>>>
>>> Does this mean the other shoe has dropped for MySQL AB?
>>
>> The deal's not gone through yet, but it sure does look like they want to
>> put a hammerlock on MySQL ...
>
> Is it possible that Oracle is trying to buy MySQL to kill off other open
> source competitor, e.g. PostgreSQL?  MySQL has a strong number of users and
> therefore it is a good deal for Oracle to buy MySQL.  Then by doing that,
> Oracle will market MySQL as the low-end alternative to their own database to
> give a full solution to the customer.  And this would slow down the take up
> rate for other database competitor.

I've always thought that mysql has a large number of users because all the
various web apps (guestbooks, forums, blogs, calendars, etc.) were written
with mysql as the backend.  So, average joe who wants a blog is going to
end up using mysql because that's his only *free* choice.

I base this just on my occasional inquiries into such software and how
many of them support mysql and not postgresql.

I would think that if mysql dissappeared all of those applications would
switch to either sqlite or postgresql in a heartbeat.  Some already are...

I also suspect the windows version of mysql had a lot to do with it as
people could run IIS, php, and mysql locally on their desktop for their
development server...


-philip